The theme was the flip-side of DEFCON 26's "1983" tone-the "the inflection point between disorder and dystopia," as Moss had put it in a Twitter post. Meetings are being met, plans are being planned, and the #defcon27theme is ready for its unveiling. Preparations are well underway for #DEFCON 27. Moss later posted the image through DEFCON's Twitter account. But I'd always said if Jeff ever asked to me again to do it then I'll do it." Magical crystals had spoken my mind, right? I had done the artwork that I wanted to do and shared that side of me with other people and whatever. Like I'm not a puzzle, my brain doesn't work like a puzzle master."Īfter his fifth year, as "badge life" blossomed in full, "I said I was never going do it again because I. I'm like, 'what can I do better, what technique can I try, what new art thing can I try?' And my design aesthetic has always been, even with professional products that I do, just very simple, effective things. Then every year, I'd always compete with myself. "And it really was exciting to see this growth. "Little by little, you'd see other badges starting to come up, with people creating their own for their parties," Grand recalled. And people really liked it."Īfter DEFCON 14, electronic badges began to gradually take on a life of their own. "In the beginning, we didn't know how people would respond, so we did a simple kind of artistic badge. Grand originally started off designing DEFCON badges as part of an effort "to bring awareness of hardware and hardware hacking to DEFCON," he said. It's a minor technological miracle that the badges had a relatively low failure rate at the conference-and many of those failures were a result of the hacks performed by attendees. I kind of put myself in that mindset of like, what if I was attending DEFCON for the first time? What would that feel like?"ĭelivery of the badges required for DEFCON 27 came down to the wire, and Grand had to push manufacturing straight from first working prototype to full production. Grand told Moss that he wanted to do something simple "that can appeal to as many people as possible, because the puzzles that have been done are amazing, but I didn't want to exclude people. "That's why they call it 'badge life'." Advertisement The task of turning out the DEFCON badge "is a full-time effort," Grand said. Of course, that shows that I'd forgotten the difficulty of actually designing badges." Grand acknowledged. Grand agreed, as he had spent much of 2018 traveling to speak and teach, "and I wanted to stay at home… like this would be a great opportunity to stay at home, work on a project, I can see my family more, I won't be on the road. Grand said Moss "called me out of the blue at the end of December and he's like, 'Hey, do you want to do the DEFCON badge?' Well, it was a decent amount of time… it would've been better to be like the day after last DEFCON." Just before DEFCON kicked off, Grand spoke with Ars about this year's badge design and the effort required to put together a real-world electronic quest for about 30,000 friends. Joe Grand, (AKA "Kingpin"), the designer of DEFCON's very first electronic, hackable badges (used for DEFCONs 14 through 18) returned to the task for this year's 27 th edition of the event at the request of DEFCON founder Jeff Moss ("Dark Tangent"). This year's badges, however, were both deceptively simple and cunningly complex, designed to get DEFCON attendees to interact with each other and explore the whole of the conference rather than falling too deeply into a badge rabbit hole. Last year's badge was a sophisticated puzzle challenge that included a social element and even a built-in text-based adventure. The DEFCON electronic badges-which for a time were used every other year because of the effort and budget that went into them-are typically the delivery vehicle for a unifying game. But the most visible, unifying part of DEFCON is its badges. And there are the Villages, each of them conferences unto themselves appealing to specific security and hacking communities. It's the largest, of course, with over 30,000 attendees, sprawling over four hotels in Las Vegas this year. LAS VEGAS-There are many things that make the DEFCON conference stand above all other hacking conferences. Joe Grand/ DEFCON reader comments 18 with
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